For an artist with an increadibly recognisabel style, I'm really struggling to pick out defining features aren't I!

On Mick:

Michael ‘Mike’ ‘Mick’
(he uses Mick on his own website, and that’s good enough for me!) McMahon is
one of 2000AD’s all time art legends. Pretty much everyone raves about his
work, and only has nice things to say about the man himself, too. I’m not going
to deviate from those opinions, but I am going to come at the legend from a
different angle. Because it’s the only way I know how!

I came to 2000AD as a
youngster in the mid 80s, a year or so after McMahon had stopped working for
Tharg, and long, long before his occasional returns to the fold. My first
exposure to his work was from old Judge
Dredd reprints in the Best of 2000AD
Monthly, and as such my response to his work was ‘oh, so that’s what Dredd
used to look like in the olden days before artists had worked out how to draw
properly.’

Dynamic for sure, but not at all polished
Words by Peter Harris (and maybe a fair bit of Pat Mills)

To my eyes now: gorgeous
To my eyes then: what is this weirdness
Words by Pat Mills

It was a very similar
reaction to my first exposure to Jack Kirby, another universally-beloved comics
legend, when I first saw reprints of his Fantastic
Four and Avengers work. “This is
weird and blocky and crude” was the general tenor of my thoughts. Same for
McMahon, only substitute ‘blocky’ for ‘scratchy’.

Young me was clearly
an idiot. Or, to be charitable, was more interested in comics art as only about
storytelling, and not bothered about comics art as actual art.

An argument can
certainly be made that McMahon’s very first strips for 2000AD were pretty
crude, but they were brimming with zest, movement and that tang of weirdness
that permeates the best of 2000AD art.

Functional monsters, but also so much more!
Words by Wagner & Grant, I think

The story goes that
McMahon was commissioned, at first, to draw in the style of Dredd-creator
Carlos Ezquerra. Which he duly did – but fairly soon developed his own style,
which he has refined, exaggerated and generally reinvented many times since. And,
in fact, his storytelling skills were pretty good at the start – it’s just that
he pretty quickly seemed to be interested in using his pages to draw some sneaky
fine art in amongst the story.

Straight-up storytelling, with added cuteness
Words by Pat Mills

Storytelling success, but so much more - the poses, the detail on the toad skin, the funky v-headed alien design, the brickwork!
Words by John Wagner

Rico Dredd, one of many arch-nemesises
words by Pat Mills

As well as moulding
Dredd’s helmet as if it was made of clay, McMahon treated readers to
increasingly gigantic boots, and an array of sneering, snarling, and gleefully
unkempt bad guys. Especially impressive was Rico Dredd, a man with so much
invasive medical chicanery on his face, all other artists since have chosen to
dial it back.

McMahon was far and
away the most prolific Judge Dredd
artist for the first few years, and across the span of his work on the
character between Prog 2 and Prog 196 (and one episode of Block Mania a good
bit later), you can see his style develop and refine enormously.

Svelte, Dredd, round helmet
Words by Peter Harris

Stocky Dredd, square helmet
Words by John Wagner

Dredd gets wider; helmet now a semi-circle.
Words by John Wagner

His art seems to work
sometimes by sheer force of will – huge numbers of lines and great swathes of
ink - but at the same time, very deliberate use of space and occasionally using
very little brushwork to convey a lot. Hair, wrinkles on faces and clothes,
shadows falling, all meticulously picked out on the page. All in service to the
story, but, like the best comics artists, there’s the pure pleasure of a
drawing in there nearly every time.

Judge Caligula: the shiny face
and curly hair of insanity
Words by John Wagner

Lines on clothing but not on face:
the beauty of Lara
Words by Pat Mills

At a certain point he
seemed to be into shiny patches on round surfaces, from elbows, chins and noses
to gleaming metal robots.

Shiny!

He also came to do an
absolutely fantastic line in the various forms of evil, whether it’s the pure
evil of the devil, or the vacant evil of the psychopath, or the more subtle
evil of someone like Dredd, who hides behind his stubborn obsession with the
law to sidestep moral quandaries, and even the naïve evil of Slaine, who
resorts to violence and trusts in his beliefs without ever stopping to think
about them much.

Lunatic evil from two rival burger barons
Words by John Wagner

Pure eeee-vil, like the fru-its of the Dev-ille
Words by Pat Mills

Pure evil meets stubborn evil
Words by John Wagner

Banal evil
Words by John Wagner

But I’m getting ahead
of myself! Before McMahon’s fantastical adventures, he had fun with Ro-Busters, the ABC Warriors, and paused briefly to dash off episode one of the VCs, designing a wealth of new
characters, spaceships and crazy-looking spacesuits. Masterful stuff – although
I think it did make sense for the more hard-action stylings of Kennedy and
Leach to see through the series proper.

I especially love the loudspeakers on the helmets, designed for that oh-so tricky communication in space...
Words by Gerry Finley-Day

McMahon’s work on the ABC Warriors in particular really cemented something that I think
of as a grounded, earthy quality to his work. When you’re depicting futuristic
robots and still make everything look grimy, broken and lived-in, it really
brings home the sense of realness, for want of a better word.

Robots fighting robots, but a very human-feeling battle
Words by Pat Mills

Robots in camouflage (not in disguise)
Context by Pat Mills

Obviously this went to
a whole new level with Slaine, the
Earth Warrior. McMahon seemingly filled the page with black ink and scratched
away at it to reveal the pictures hidden within*. And what pictures! Again,
8-year-old me was left a bit cold. Why didn’t Slaine look normal? What’s with
all the exaggerated limbs? But with more mature eyes it’s amongst the very best
art ever printed in the Prog. Living forests of fear. Maggoty druids, wracked
with their own guilt. Flying ships full of angry Vikings, for goodness’ sake!

Uncanniest. Forest. EVER.
Words by Pat Mills

Best death scene in 2000AD? Gotta be a contender.
Words by Pat Mills

And for a long while,
that seemed to be that – no more McMahon** for years and years, until the
Megazine loudly hailed his return to the fold.

Now in colour,
McMahon’s style was as different again from his Slaine work as that had been from his earlier Dredds. And yet, you
can still see the same basic McMahon-iness in the characters, the poses, and
the striving to tell a story and draw some goddamn art, too. I don’t know if
his work on Howler, and the handful
of Judge Dredd work that followed, is
actually straight-up cubism, but it’s clearly not far from that world (with a
hint of futurism thrown in as regards his love of chunky lines of solid
colour?).

Fine art fight scene
Words by John Wagner

If there’s something
noticeably different about his recent work, for me it’s the random background
details. The Mega Citizens just loafing along while Dredd busts perps. I
suppose there’s also a lot more overt thinking going on in the panel
construction, the deliberate positioning of people and characters at certain
angles that speaks as much to questions of form and style as it does to ‘what’s
going on in this part of the story’.

Car chase!
Words by Chris Standley

Tripods run rampant on Mars. Innocent bystanders get killed.
Words by Pat Mills

I also can’t help but
wonder if, in his published work, there’s a hint of playfulness about the work
that says ‘I know you liked it when I drew in the old style, but I’m absolutely
not going to do that any more!’

Still the same characters, but as you've never seen them before!

More on Mick McMahon:

He recently shut down his blog, but you can still read it on the Wayback Machine

There's a transcription of a 1993 interview with the man on Elliott Scribblings blog

And an appreciation of the man's work by fellow 2000AD artist Adrian Salmon

An interview with another fellow 2000AD artistRufus Dayglo on Eirecom.net

4 comments:

Regarding his Sláine technique - I'm sure I read somewhere that in preparing one of the pages he noticed the scribbled in black areas on a piece of tracing paper, prior to transferring to art board and decided to go with that tribal style instead.

McMahon is great. I've read so many of the stories you posted, this sure brings back some warm memories. By the way, I just read your post about Ian Gibson and it was awesome. And I see your avatar is Hoagy from one of the classic Sam Slade stories. Anyway, I just wrote about Wagner and Gibson's Robo-Hunter Sam Slade in my blog (wich I encourage you to visit):

www.artbyarion.blogspot.com

I hope you enjoy my review, and please feel free to leave me a comment over there or add yourself as a follower (or both), and I promise I'll reciprocate.